


We Finish Each Other's...

by lilyhandmaiden



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy, F/M, Gen, Pre-Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-01-10 17:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyhandmaiden/pseuds/lilyhandmaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first sentence Leo Fitz spoke to Jemma Simmons was the first sentence she finished for him. Their actual friendship, however, was more of a process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sentences

On his first day of SHIELD Academy orientation, Leo Fitz was the farthest he’d ever been from home, alone, confused, and extremely tired. Also, he was slowly becoming aware that a girl was staring at him.

She was sitting halfway across the room, and every time he turned in her direction, she looked startled and averted her eyes. Fitz wondered if he’d somehow gotten ink on his face, and tried surreptitiously to rub it off, just in case. In his peripheral vision, he could see the staring girl frown a little, like she was wondering what the hell he was doing. So, a) not surreptitious, and b) probably not ink, then.

What was her problem? Was it _that_ obvious that he was the youngest one there? This was supposed to be the place he’d finally fit in, a fresh start, but was he already doomed to be the weirdo in the school for weirdos? _Really?_ He just wanted to blend into the crowd for once. And he should have. Staring Girl herself looked like she could have been his age, or not far from it. He shot her a glare, and she kept her eyes off him for the rest of the introductory lecture.

But afterward she actually _came up to him_ , and for a terrifying second he was afraid he was supposed to have recognized her from somewhere, and that was why she’d been staring. But then she held out her hand and said, brightly, “Hello. I’m Jemma Simmons,” and he relaxed a bit. That wasn’t the name of anyone he knew, he was fairly sure, although her accent marked her as a fellow UK native.

He shook her hand. "I’m—”

“Leopold Fitz. I know. I recognized you from your Young Geniuses to Watch profile in the _Sunday Times_ last year. I was in it, too. My mum framed it. I’ve sort of been looking at your face all summer.” She laughed a little self-consciously, and smiled.

Fitz found himself smiling back. “It’s Leo. Or Fitz—most people just call me Fitz.”

That was the first time she finished one of his sentences.


	2. Sandwiches

Fitz had been at SHIELD Academy for about six weeks, but he’d decided he hated it in week two. The decision wasn’t brought on by any particular event; it was simply clear to him by that point that he’d come all this way to still be the youngest and the smartest in any given room. Granted, here was only _barely_ the youngest—Jemma Simmons turned out to be just three months older than him.

But Jemma Simmons was different. A group of freshman girls seemed to have adopted her as a sort of surrogate little sister, which was not too surprising—Jemma Simmons, with her unflagging _niceness_ , was an easy person to like. Leo Fitz was aware that he was not. Oh, in the first week, he’d been designated “adorable,” which was fine, albeit condescending, but more recently he’d been called “short stuff,” “hobbit,” “Wunderkind” (facetiously), and “Little Man Tate” (by someone who really needed to update his references). He just never knew what to say to people. Keeping himself to himself had always been safer, but it was also another thing that set him apart. By now, he was used to a certain amount of isolation and mockery.

Two things made the Academy worse. The first was that it was so far from home. At least in Scotland there were acquaintances and familiar faces. Even the arseholes, come to that, were familiar arseholes. From the moment he’d gotten off the plane, he’d been plunged into a different cultural environment and surrounded by strangers. It was lonely in a way nothing before now could match. The support system of professors he’d built up at Glasgow and Edinburgh were an ocean away, and he was having to start all over.

This was proving difficult, because the second thing that made the Academy worse was that here, for the first time, people were expecting him to fail. He could read it in every passive-aggressive gesture: there was no way someone as young as him could take the pressure. They were just waiting for him to get completely overwhelmed and wash out. Well, he wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction.

Years of trying to blend in meant that he never talked much about what he was working on, but just by listening in, he could tell that he was the most intelligent person in his year, at least—with the possible exception of the aforementioned Jemma Simmons.

This made her the competition.

Fitz had never really had competition before, and he found himself both annoyed and pleased by it. He’d been frankly appalled the first time he’d glanced over and seen that she’d gotten a higher score on an assignment than he had—he couldn’t remember the last time that had happened with anybody. But suddenly schoolwork interested him in a way it hadn’t in years. He even put forth the effort to _study_ , just as a precaution. He was fine with being slightly younger than Jemma Simmons, as long as he could also be at least slightly _smarter_.

When the second assignment of the year came back and he saw that his marks were indeed higher than hers, he uttered a little, “ha!” loud enough to make Jemma Simmons raise her eyebrows. From that point, the game was on, and it carried over into every class they shared. She smiled smugly while he glowered in silence when she won the next round, but he returned the gesture the round after that. Since then she’d won twice in a row, though, so he was particularly pleased to see her hide the exam they’d gotten back today, flipping it over until she could stuff it into her bag—a sure sign of his triumph. He settled into a private gloat which probably would have lasted the rest of the day, had he not happened to see Jemma Simmons a few hours later in the Howard Stark Building lounge, looking for all the world like someone had killed her puppy.

She was staring into space, her chin resting on her hands, which were folded on the table between her laptop and a half-eaten sandwich. All at once, Fitz felt terrible.

_It’s not like you graded the exams_ , he tried to tell himself, but that voice was drowned out by the realization that maybe Jemma Simmons was feeling the pressure, too, and he, like a massive prat, had only been adding to it. He considered fleeing from what felt like the scene of his crime, but then he thought about what his mother would say. Sighing, Fitz sidled over to the table like some sort of awkward crab and stood, hovering over Jemma Simmons.

“Hey,” he said. “Are... you all right?”

She glanced up. “Oh. Hello, Fitz. Of course I am.” She was a rotten liar. Her smile was shaky, and her eyes were red-rimmed like—oh God, had she been _crying_?

_Excellent work, Fitz_ , he thought. _You’ve been here six weeks and you’ve made no friends, but you have managed to make a girl cry._

“It was a difficult test,” he blurted. “For Carroll’s class, I mean.”

“Yes, it was.” Her expression was difficult to read—maybe a little confused.

“I’m sure you did fine—I mean, compared to the rest of that lot. You’re really clever. Your grade couldn’t have been _that_ bad.”

“It wasn’t.” She added a sardonic, “Thanks.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that, I just meant—So you screwed up one test, no need to feel bad about yourself. I mean, just ‘cause I scored higher than you, that’s no reason to get upset.”

“I’m not.” She was staring at him now. “You think I’m upset about that?”

“Well...” Fitz hesitated. He felt like a rug had just been pulled out from under him. “Aren’t you? You and I, we’ve sort of been—”

“Competing, yes. But that’s just a bit of fun.”

Fitz blinked. _Fun?_ “Oh? Right, well, yes. Of course it is. I was just checking that it was for you as well.” Shifting uncomfortably, he added, “’Cause you look a bit—well—sad. No offense.” His eyes fixed on his shoes as though they were an 0-8-4 in need of intense study.

“Oh, for goodness sake.” Jemma Simmons rolled her eyes, checked her reflection as best she could in her laptop screen, and smoothed her hair. “I’m not delicate as all _that_. I have got a life outside of class with you, thank you very much.”

“Oh. Um. Good. Of course you have.” Fitz could feel himself blushing. He had set out to be nice and had wound up being told to get over himself. How was he actually that bad at this?

Before he could make his ungraceful exit, Jemma Simmons looked up at him. “I’m sorry. It was sweet of you to ask.” She sighed. “But it’s nothing, really. I was just talking to my parents on the phone, and... I’m homesick, I suppose. Everything feels so far away. I miss it. Is that really pathetic?”

“No,” Fitz said. His bag was too heavy to keep standing with it; he lowered it to the floor and dropped into the chair next to her. “Or maybe, but anyway, I miss it, too.” He thought about the time last week when he’d started to call his mum, but realized just before hitting “send” that it was 1 a.m. in Glasgow. It had felt like a ton of bricks settling in his stomach. But he wasn’t about to say that to Jemma Simmons. What he said instead was, “I miss the BBC, the NHS... Nando’s...”

She smiled—a real smile this time. “Public railways and proper spelling...”

“The decent chocolate...”

“The terrible weather...”

“Seriously, what is with all this sun? It can’t be healthy.”

She laughed a little, then said, “I miss my mum and dad. And my cat.”

“Me too,” Fitz admitted. “Well, I don’t have a cat, but... But anyway, _you’ve_ got loads of friends here, at least. Those girls you hang around with.”

“Sort of.” Her fingers tore at the foil her sandwich had been wrapped in. “They’re very kind. Except they sometimes treat me like a child... or a mascot. I don’t think they realize they’re doing it. They take me to dinner and give me makeup tips and things, but then other times they’ll sort of forget about me. They’ve never asked me to come to the Boiler Room with them.”

“What’s the Boiler Room?”

“It’s just a place where people socialize.” The careful way she said this made it clear she was trying not to make him feel bad for not knowing.

“Well, it doesn’t sound like much fun, anyway.”

“Maybe not. But at the end of the day, they’d rather be with each other. They don’t want me tagging along.”

It suddenly clicked in Fitz’s mind that the reason he could always see Jemma Simmons’s grades was that she sat next to him in every single one of their mutual classes. All the freshman had to take the intro courses, and some of her friends were always around, but they always sat with each other, whereas Jemma had been sitting beside him the whole damn time. He didn’t really know what to say to that. For a while, the two of them sat side by side in silence.

Finally, Fitz asked, “Are you going to eat the rest of that sandwich?” It had honestly been bothering him, the waste of a perfectly good half of a lunch.

Jemma looked like she’d forgotten it was there. “Oh. No, go ahead, if you want it. I’m not diseased or anything. I owe you for listening to all of that.”

As he pulled the sandwich toward him, he nodded at her laptop. “What’re you working on, then?”

“Oh, nothing too exciting, just the quantum mechanics homework.”

He would have asked her how that was going, except that he then took a bite of the sandwich, and suddenly had more pressing concerns.

“This is incredible. Where did you get this? I’ll help you with the quantum mechanics problem if you tell me where you got this.”

“I made it,” she said, “and I’ve already solved the quantum mechanics problem, actually. I’d just finished when my parents... What?”

Fitz’s sandwich-filled mouth had fallen open. He closed it, swallowed, then scoffed. “How did you manage that?”

“The homework or the sandwich?”

“Either.”

“The sandwich is prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella with pesto aioli. And, since you offered help, I assume you know how to solve the homework problem yourself.”

“I do—I have solved it!” For half a second, curiosity warred with pride. “But... what did you come up with?”

Jemma Simmons smirked. “As if I’d tell you.” His face must have shown his consternation, because she looked a little concerned as she added, “We’ve still got a competition on, haven’t we?”

That was the first time he finished one of her sandwiches.


	3. Homework

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Andrew, who will never read this, for unwittingly serving as my scientific adviser, and to Kelly for acting as a triple threat of scientific adviser, scientific interpreter, and beta reader.

Fitz had always thought he worked better alone. This was not pure conjecture; he’d built up quite a bit of evidence over the years. In theory he could’ve worked with a friend in his class, like most people did, but that idea had been merely theoretical since he’d started university. Instead, he’d watch his classmates, all more than five years older than himself, pair off, and wait to see who he got stuck with.

His lab partners had tended to fall into one of two categories: those who had wanted to ride the coattails of the genius boy to an A, and those who’d had enthusiasm, but were so much slower than him that communication proved difficult. In either case, out of necessity or impatience, he’d always ended up doing most of the work on his own anyway.

In his eighth week at SHIELD Academy, his Introductory Neuroscience instructor uttered the dreaded words, “choose a lab partner for this project,” and Fitz decided it was finally time he took his academic fate into his own hands. He turned in desperation to the person sitting next to him, his friendly rival, the one person at the Academy he’d had an actual conversation with so far, and asked, “Do you wanna work with me?”

Jemma Simmons’s face lit up like he’d proposed marriage.

It didn’t go perfectly. The phrase, “Sorry, I’m used to working alone,” was uttered frequently by both parties. There were times when they reached for the same thing at the same time, once resulting in a shattered beaker and a spill they had to stop to clean up. There were times when she moved something and it took him a few minutes to find it, and then when he put it back where he had it, _she_ couldn’t find it.

But there were also times when, without even thinking about it, they fell so into synch that it was like a choreographed dance. When they started to get the results they’d predicted, he caught her eye and knew, absolutely _knew_ , that her wide grin and sparkling eyes were the exact mirror of his own. Jemma didn’t fall into any lab partner category he’d previously devised. She _loved_ this—figuring out the way the world worked. She loved it like _he_ did. Working with Jemma was something entirely new.

When they finished cleaning up on their last day of the lab, he said, “That was really...”

“Fun,” they finished together.

Without further ado, she invited him over to her dorm room to do the lab report, and in the moment, getting the paperwork out of the way immediately seemed like a really good idea. It was the end of a long day, though, and Fitz was decidedly less enthusiastic about lab reports than he was about lab work. Jemma, it seemed, was not.

“Fitz, are you paying attention?”

He snapped out of his reverie. “Sure, yeah. ‘Course I am.” The look she gave him was skeptical and a little disappointed. A sharp surge of guilt took him by surprise. He found that he really didn’t like the idea of disappointing her after their work together over the past few days, and he couldn’t convince himself that it was just because she’d interpret any perceived weakness on his part as a victory in their game of one-upsmanship. The truth was, he liked her company, and he wanted her to like him, even though he thought he’d given up caring whether or not people liked him years ago. In his own defense, he said, “You know it’s not due for three days, right?”

“Of course. But don’t you want to stay on top of things? Besides, there are worse ways to spend an evening.”

“That’s... true.” It was his turn to sound skeptical.

To his credit, Fitz did try to focus on the assignment. He managed to complete all the charts and graphs, but his mind kept wandering to all the things he’d rather be doing instead. It wasn’t that he ever neglected his schoolwork, not at this point in his career, but he was more of a pull-off-something-brilliant-at-the-last-minute type of person. That was why he was usually so good at exams. He tended not to put a lot of effort into things he didn’t think mattered as much, and it still came out all right. Judging by her look of intense concentration, Jemma did not think this way. She probably had nightmares about waiting until the last minute to do things.

It puzzled him, because in some ways he had never met someone so much like him, but in others, Jemma Simmons was completely his opposite. Take her room, for example. He’d never been in her room before, and he couldn’t help gazing about him a bit. Compared to his own, Jemma’s dorm was immaculate. Granted, this was true of a lot of dorms, and not just because the gifted and talented of SHIELD Academy had a higher-than-average rate of obsessive and/or compulsive tendencies. For all his advanced intelligence, Fitz lived like a typical teenage boy among piles of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes—although these were, in his case, mixed in with bits of tools and gadgetry. But tidiness suited Jemma Simmons, somehow.

“Fitz, are you all right? You’re staring sort of blankly.”

He shook himself. “Just drifting a little. Maybe caffeine would help. Do you have any soda?” He nodded in the direction of her mini-fridge.

“Oh. No,” Jemma replied with evident regret. “Sorry. The refrigerator’s sort of broken.”

“Well, maybe it’ll help if I just walk around a bit. Get the blood flowing.”

He stood up, swinging his arms back and forth, and started to stroll a counter-clockwise circuit of Jemma’s perfectly tidy room. He took advantage of the opportunity to look around a bit more. It wasn’t snooping—not if she was right there, watching him do it. He just wanted to see if he could get some further insight into Jemma Simmons and how her mind worked as compared to his.

The first thing he noticed was that it wasn’t just the tidiness—everything about this room seemed to suit her, from the practical floor lamp to the blue-and-purple bedspread. The bed was neatly made (what 18-year-old makes her bed?), and on top of it was a battered old teddy bear which could originally have been any color, but was currently more or less grey. The nightstand next to the bed held two framed photographs—one of Jemma in a graduation cap between two people who were probably her parents, and one of a cat and a dog curled up next to each other on a rug. Apparently, Jemma Simmons lived in some sort of Hallmark card.

There was a bookshelf which was already mostly full, even though she probably hadn’t been able to bring over many of her books from home. The only decorations on the walls were a bulletin board covered in brochures and tickets, and two posters of world maps—one contemporary and brightly colored, the other maybe 17th-century.

Even Jemma’s desk wasn’t cluttered with as much junk as Fitz’s was—no nuts and bolts and gears on every surface—but then she was bio or chem or both, so most of her stuff had to stay in the labs. She did have as much of the chem kit as they were allowed to have in their rooms, along with a microscope which must’ve been her own, and a pile of typed pages and handwritten notes. The only thing which didn’t seem to fit in the carefully-maintained order of this room was the broken fridge, just sitting there. She hadn’t even bothered to take it out, and it wasn’t like SHIELD Academy to leave a maintenance request unanswered; it made him wonder if the whole setup wasn’t some sort of thin veneer of order overlaying a hidden chaos. Idly, Fitz picked up the top sheet of paper on the desk to see if it betrayed the deep secret of Jemma Simmons’s disorganization, but what he found was a lengthy series of formulas with the words “freezing thing” penciled in at the top.

Now _that_ sounded interesting.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Jemma glanced up from her computer screen. “What’s what?”

“Um, ‘freezing thing?’”

“Oh.” She looked slightly embarrassed. “It’s just an idea I’m working on, you know, outside of classes.” His look prompted her to continue. “It’s a process for instantaneous crystalline nucleation. I thought the rapid freezing could be handy for things like deep refrigeration, storing and preserving specimens—especially out in the field—or even freezing over small bodies of water for research or sport.”

“That sounds brilliant!” Fitz studied the sheet of paper, but he could only follow bits of it. “Does it work?”

“Well...” Jemma sighed. “Up to a point. The problem is in creating a delivery mechanism that could use that much energy without, well, exploding. The last one I tried started to overheat, so I panicked and put it in the refrigerator...” Fitz followed her gaze as she turned her eyes ruefully onto the offending appliance. “It must’ve gone haywire in there and been unable to shut off.”

Fitz edged back from the fridge by a few inches. “What happened?”

“The whole thing’s frozen shut.”

Fitz couldn’t keep his mouth from quirking into a smile. “You’re kidding.” He stepped over the mini-fridge and tried to yank the door open. It was ice cold to the touch and wouldn’t budge, didn’t even tip over when he put all his weight behind it, and something inside made an ominous creaking sound. “You’re not kidding.” His voice held a mixture of admiration and delight.

“Nope,” Jemma responded. “It’s still humming away in there. The fridge itself has been unplugged for days.”

He stood there for a minute in contemplation, one hand resting on his hip, the other rubbing his chin. A storm of tapping and clicking filled his ears as Jemma resumed typing. Finally, he said, “I think I can fix it. If you want.”

“The refrigerator? Really?”

“No. Sadly, I think that would require someone with very big muscles and a sledgehammer, at least. But I can fix your energy containment problem. I can build you a delivery mechanism that works.”

A spark kindled in Jemma’s eyes. “Are you serious?” She sat up straighter and put her laptop to one side.

“Definitely. Have you got any paper I can use?”  

“What, right now?”

“Yeah, why not?”

Jemma shook her head. “Fitz, we’ve got the lab report to finish. You said you’d do the Methods section.”

But Fitz’s imagination had been caught by this new and, frankly, far more interesting problem. He wouldn’t be able to let it go until he’d solved it—and he knew he _could_ solve it.

“I can do that later,” he said. “I’m onto a train of thought, and I don’t want risk losing it.”

Jemma looked unsure. “You really think you can make it work?”

“Look, Jem, no one else at the Academy has pulled off something like this in their first semester. This thing is genius, and I’m your guy to help you perfect it. Leave it to me, and by this time next week, every person here will be talking about Fitz and Simmons. And they won’t be treating us like little kids or waiting for us to fail. They’ll know what we can do.”

She hesitated only a second longer. “Notebook, printer, or graph paper?”

“Printer’s best.”

She retrieved a small stack of blank paper from a desk drawer, handed it to him, and stood over his shoulder as he sat on the floor and began to scribble. After a while, she pulled her laptop up next to him and continued work on the lab report, but she kept glancing over at what Fitz was doing. He was too absorbed to notice, until he heard her murmur, right by his ear, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He started up to find her eyes fixed on his notes in fascination. “Sorry,” she said, sitting back a little. “Didn’t mean to disturb you. But you’re _really_ good. You make it look so simple; it is quite impressive.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, the tips of his ears turning red. “It’s just one idea.”

She watched a while longer before saying, thoughtfully, “You said you could get it done in a week? Including testing?”

“Well...” He ran a hand through his hair. “About a week. It’d be sooner without all this bloody homework, but there’s not much can be done about that.”

A period of silence ensued, long enough that Fitz thought the conversation had ended. He jumped a bit when Jemma said, “Will it help if I finish the lab report?”

“What? No, I can’t ask you to do that. We’re partners.” As much as Fitz despised homework and would much rather be left to his own devices, he couldn’t bear the idea of actually becoming the slacker lab partner he’d so resented all these years.

But Jemma replied with a stubborn jut of her chin, “Exactly. You’re helping me with my project, and I’m helping you with yours. It’s only fair. Honestly, the one you’ve taken on is much more difficult. I’d say I still owe you, if you ever have need of a biochemist in the future.” She looked down and started picking at the carpet, avoiding his eyes.

Fitz considered. “I’ve never worked on my stuff with a partner before.”

“No, neither have I.”

He studied the sketches he’d been making for the freezing thing. Already it was more complex and involving work than anything the Academy was throwing at him. “I suppose we could give it a go. If something comes up, I mean. If you want.”

“Fitz and Simmons, giving them all hell?” She smiled.

He chuckled. “It has a certain appeal. You’re sure, though? You really don’t mind finishing the report?”

Jemma looked sheepish. “I actually really enjoy doing lab reports.”

“Yeah, I can see you do.” He nodded. “All right, Simmons, you’ve got a deal.” Fitz held out a hand, and she shook it.

That was the first time she finished his homework.


	4. Drinks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this before the "Seeds" deleted scenes came out, but I think everything but Fitz's birthday is still canon-compliant. FOR NOW.

Leo Fitz prided himself in his ability to pull things off rather brilliantly at the last minute. This worked to his advantage in the classroom and in the lab; on the last evening of his first semester at SHIELD Academy, he was beginning to hope it would be just as effective a strategy in preparing to go home for the Christmas break. His flight was set to leave the following morning, and he had no idea what he should pack.

As a first step, he had dragged his enormous suitcase out from under his bed, and he was just about to sort the clean clothes from the laundry on his floor when his phone rang. He snatched it up, glad of the distraction, and smiled when he saw the name of the caller. It meant his distraction was likely to last a while.

He answered the phone with the greeting, “Simmons—you can’t possibly want another study session, it’s the last bloody day.”

“Ha ha,” came the facetious reply, but then Simmons’s voice turned unexpectedly serious. “Fitz, I need—” Her voice broke off, and he heard conversation in the background, followed by Simmons saying to someone else, muffled, “Yes, I’m coming, just a minute.” Then she was speaking to him again, her voice clear and anxious. “ _Help_.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They’re making me go to the Boiler Room.”

Fitz blinked as his brain performed a slight recalibration. The question which bumbled its way to the front of the queue was, “Who?”

“The girls from my hall.”

“Did you try telling them no?” he asked slowly.

“It’s the last day of the semester; I couldn’t think of an excuse.”

“Wait, how are they _making_ you go?”

“They’ve got me all dressed up in borrowed clothes and they’ve done my hair and—and they’re very persuasive. You’ve _got_ to come with me.”

He sat down on the edge of his bed. “What? Me? Why?”

“I’ve never _been_ to the Boiler Room before!”

Fitz hadn’t, either. It wasn’t that he didn’t _want_ to go; he’d never been invited, and he definitely didn’t want to just show up there and hang out in a corner by himself. The thought of it made his stomach tighten even now. Simmons, he knew, _had_ been invited to the Boiler Room a couple of times recently by the aforementioned girls from her hall, but for whatever reason, she’d turned them down to work on stuff with him. Once they’d had another lab assignment and were up late working with specimens. Another time they’d had a brainstorming session which had resulted in about nine new freelance project ideas. He’d assured her they could reschedule if she wanted to go, but she’d told him not to be silly. “That’s not really my thing,” she’d said, as if it were nothing at all that she’d chosen him over them. “This is.”

And now that she was finally being dragged to the Boiler Room, she had chosen him to go with her.

“Come on, Fitz, _please_. It’ll be noisy and crowded, and if I’m going, I want you there.”

As if he was going to say no to _that_.

And so, some twenty minutes later, Fitz was cautiously approaching the legendary-among-SciTech-Academy-students Boiler Room. Truth be told, he _had_ considered calling Simmons back and telling her no. The minute he’d hung up the phone, his mind had started playing out scenarios of what could go wrong—that he’d get there and Simmons wouldn’t be there, that she’d leave him sitting by himself while she socialized with her friends, that she’d expect _him_ to socialize with her friends, that there’d be some sort of bouncer who wouldn’t let him in, that everyone would notice him, that no one would notice him. And Simmons was right that it would be loud and crowded, he’d be surrounded by people he didn’t particularly like and who didn’t like him, and besides, he really did need to pack... but he’d told her he’d be there, and he couldn’t just ditch her to face something she was clearly also dreading all alone.

It had taken an embarrassingly long time for him to figure out what to wear so that he’d blend in, but finally he’d given it his best guess, and now here he was, loitering in a hallway, trying to figure out if he was in the right place.

There was no sign to indicate that he’d found the Boiler Room—well, aside from the tiny one next to the door reading, “Boiler Room,” but all the buildings on campus had one of those. He supposed that was the point, really. Still, it would have been helpful if someone had maybe put up an additional label saying, “Yes, _The_ Boiler Room,” or something.

He heard footsteps approaching and stepped back from the door, adopting the attitude of someone who definitely had business in this hallway, but who was perhaps taking a moment to recollect where the nearest toilets were. The group of upper-level Academy students passed by without seeming to notice him and opened the Boiler Room door. All of a sudden, dance music and atmospheric lighting flooded the hall, and just as suddenly, when the door closed behind them, all was quiet. Fitz felt like he was standing outside Platform 9 3/4. All he had to do was barge through that door and enter a different world.

He took a deep breath, and did.

As it was the last day of term, the Boiler Room was packed with people. He didn’t see Simmons anywhere, and as he made his way down the steps and through the crowd around the bar, he was afraid that his fears had materialized and she had left already, or hadn’t come at all. But then he felt someone grab onto his left arm as though for dear life, and he turned to see Simmons beaming at him.

“You came!” she exclaimed.

“Yeah. Told you I would, didn’t I? So here I am.” He blinked. “Look at you! They’ve got you all dressed up like a girl!”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it just so happens that I _am_ a girl.”

“You’re wearing a skirt!”

“Shut up!” She guided him through the amassed people and to a table off to the side. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been sitting over with everyone’s coats and bags.”

“Where are your friends?” Now that they were out of the main fray, he didn’t have to shout so much to be heard.

“Oh, they all went off elsewhere, you know. Met up with other people. They should be back any time.” She was clearly trying to put a brave face on her abandonment with the coats. He was about to attempt encouragement and say that he was sure she had other people to meet up with as well, when he realized that her other person was him.

It occurred to him that this was the first time they’d hung out together on a strictly social basis, without even the pretext of a project to work on. The closest they’d come before this had been over the Thanksgiving holiday, when the freezing device she’d let loose in her refrigerator had finally given out and she’d called for him to bring a handcart and help her pry the fridge up (it had actually frozen to the floor by that point) and move it out. Afterward, they’d had dinner, and the next day he’d helped her pick out a new fridge, but that had all been in name of their scientific collaboration.

Hadn’t it?

Suddenly, he wondered if Jemma Simmons was becoming his girlfriend. The thought startled him. He’d never really had a girlfriend before—not a real one. Was this how it happened? Was that why she’d invited him here?

Fitz shut down this line of thought and stored it away for future contemplation when he realized he was just staring at Simmons in silence. His eyes darted down to fix on his hands, folded on the table in front of him as though he were actually _praying_ that this not be too awkward, and he mentally groped for something to say.

It was Simmons who broke in first with a, “So...”

“So...” he echoed. This shouldn’t be so hard—it was just _Simmons_ , after all. He bit his lip, eyes casting around the room for a topic of conversation. “So this is the Boiler Room.”

“Apparently,” she agreed. “What do you think?”

“It’s very... uh... big. It’s bigger than I expected.”

She scrunched up her nose. “Honestly, I think it’s a bit boring.”

Once more scanning the room full of strangers who were, as far as he could tell, just standing around, Fitz couldn’t help but agree.

Just then, they were approached by a man in his early twenties, stumbling a bit, both his arms upraised.  “Hey!” He grinned at them. Fitz could smell the beer from where he sat. “High five!” the man demanded. He held up a hand to Fitz, who obliged, although he was not sure what for. The man turned to Simmons. “High five?” She shot Fitz a bemused look before doing as requested. “Yeah! All right!” the guy cheered and moved on to the next table to repeat his performance there.

Fitz nodded after him. “That wasn’t boring. That was a bit of an event.”

“Sort of, but it’s cyclical. I already high-fived him once before you got here. I don’t know, do you think we’re doing this whole thing wrong? I mean, other people seem to be having a good time.”

Fitz sat back and tapped at his lower lip in thought. “Maybe. High-Five Guy looks like he’s having loads of fun.”

Simmons rolled her eyes. “I’m sure if we were that intoxicated, we’d find all this fun, too.”

“Maybe that’s all it is.” He leaned forward again. “Maybe that’s what we’re missing.”

 “ _Or_ maybe we could just leave,” she countered.

But at those words, the unresolved girlfriend question rose up in his mind again. If they left together, would that make it a date? Would she want to go do some date-like activity instead? No, it would definitely be safer to see how things played out here, at least until he got a better handle on the situation.

In his newfound and urgent determination to stay where they were, he started to babble: “No, seriously. It’s worth testing the hypothesis, right? I mean, we don’t have to drink _that_ much, obviously, but—”

Simmons smiled and shook her head. “Fitz...”

“Come on, Simmons. It’s the end of the term, let’s stay here and have one celebratory drink.”

“Fitz, no. We can’t!”

“Why not?”

She lowered her voice. “Because it’s against the _law_. We’re underage!”

Fitz’s mouth fell open a little. All he could think to say was the painfully obvious, “But you’re eighteen.”

“But I’m not twenty-one, which means it’s not legal _here_. I’m sure you know that.”

“But that’s a technicality!” he sputtered. “You’re not even _from_ here! You’re a British citizen. And besides, I don’t think the cops are going to do a raid on a boiler room at SHIELD Academy.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Simmons had that stubborn set to her jaw again. Fitz had come to recognize it over the past weeks of working with her in and out of class. “It’s the _principle_. We can’t be SHIELD agents if we go around breaking the rules all the time.”

“First of all,” Fitz wagged his index finger in her face, “I count at least three twenty-year-olds here who would disagree with you.”

Simmons craned her neck around, doing a quick tally. “Ahmad, Derek, and...?”

“Cassie.”

She winced. “Oh, but Cassie’s going to wash out soon, surely. Don’t you think so?”

“Don’t change the subject.” A thought occurred to him. “Wait, when did you turn eighteen, exactly?”

“The eleventh of September.”

“At which point you were already here. So does that mean, Miss Legal Technicalities, that you’ve never yet bought a drink at _all_?”

“It does,” she admitted.

“What a waste of an eighteenth birthday.” Fitz shook his head. “But you will observe the occasion when you get back home in a couple of days, yeah?”

Simmons avoided meeting his eyes. “I might. I don’t know. I don’t know where to go or what I’d like... I tried my mum’s wine once when I was about ten, and I didn’t really like it then, so...”

“Simmons,” Fitz groaned. He lowered his head to the table, resting his forehead between his two hands. “Simmons. Please tell me you’re joking. Please tell me you’ve had more than one drink in your entire life up to this point.” He looked up. She gave a helpless shrug. “You’re a disgrace to your country. You know that?”

“You have to understand, I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. The only people offering were my parents, my aunts, and my grandmother. Now, I have no idea what my tolerance is, but I assume it’s not very high, and I did not want my first time sloshed to be in front of my gran.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” he conceded.

“And where do you get all this vast experience with alcohol, anyway? I assume you haven’t been able to buy it illegally since, if anything, you look younger than you are.”

“Thanks,” he returned sarcastically. “My cousins and I started sneaking drinks from our parents’ liquor cabinets at birthday parties when I was about thirteen, so by the time we got offered beer by our parents, we were prepared,” he said. “Technically, I suppose my first time sloshed might have been in front of my gran, but I don’t think she noticed. She probably just thought we’d all had too much cake.”

Simmons laughed. “I’m not sure whose story is more sad.”

“It’s yours, definitely,” he replied with mock solemnity. “However, we can do something about it.” He looked pointedly at her and then toward the bar. Simmons only rolled her eyes. “Look, do you want to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of your gran or not?”

“It’s still illegal.”

“Yeah, but—”

“High five!” That came from High Five Guy, who had made his way back to their table.

“Come on, Simmons,” Fitz coaxed, once they had given their high-fives and were alone again at the table. “What would High Five Guy do?”

“I hardly think I should take High Five Guy as my model for decision-making.”

He sighed. “All right. I didn’t want to have to play this card, but... it will be my birthday over the holiday.”

This gave Simmons pause. “Oh no, really?”

“Yeah. My eighteenth birthday. And what I would like for my eighteenth birthday, Jemma Simmons, is for you to let me get you a drink so you can properly celebrate _your_ eighteenth birthday.”

Simmons pressed her hands to the sides of her face and groaned. “Oh, all _right_.”

Apparently no one in the Boiler Room was particularly assiduous about checking ID, so within only a few minutes, Fitz was drinking a beer and Simmons was sipping a rum and Coke which she deemed “not bad.” He was congratulating himself on a job well done until it occurred to him that buying the drinks was something a boyfriend would do.

Before he had much time to contemplate this misstep, though, one of the girls from Simmons’s hall—Krista, he thought—returned to the table and saw them there.

“Fitz!” she squealed. “What are you doing here?!”

He hadn’t thought she knew his name. He stammered, “Ah, I was just...”

But Krista didn’t want to hear his answer. She called out, “Hey! The British babies are in the Boiler Room!” and suddenly they were surrounded. It seemed like everyone he’d had class with all semester was there, along with a few he’d never seen before, and for the first time ever they all wanted to talk to him—well, him and Simmons. Overlapping questions flew at them:

“That crystalline nucleation process—that thing’s so cool! No pun intended.”

“How did you come up with it?”

“How did you get it to store all that energy?”

He felt a warm glow of pride and, meeting Simmons’s eyes across the table, didn’t hesitate to boast a little. Neither did she, although she overlaid it with a thin veneer of less-than-sincere humility (“Oh, it was nothing. It just came to me.”).

But then the questions shifted, asking about _them_ and not just their work:

“Where exactly are you guys from?”

“How do you like the U.S.?”

“How old were you when you started university?”

“Oh, uh, eleven,” Fitz mumbled, and waited for the teasing.

But before anyone could say anything else, Simmons called out, “I was ten!”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Yeah, but look at you now, just the _second_ -youngest student ever admitted to the SHIELD Academy.”

“Only because I have one more doctorate than you.” There was a general “oooooh” from the crowd. Fitz wasn’t sure if the flush to her cheeks was from all the attention or the alcohol.

Someone asked, “Are you really the youngest _ever_?” but before things could get too awkward, Derek leapt in with, “Did you have to go to child prodigy camp? I did four summers at child prodigy camp. Do they have that in the UK?”

For a few minutes, everyone was engrossed in stories about gifted and talented camp, math camp, science camp, and space camp. Fitz glanced down and saw that Simmons’s glass was empty; she’d started drinking much more quickly once the crowd had arrived. He leaned across the table toward her. “Fortifying?”

“I don’t really feel it,” she replied.

“Want me to get you another?”

He concluded that it probably _was_ affecting her a little when she just said, “Sure.”

When he got back with their second drinks, Simmons’s attention was largely monopolized by a guy named Peter who, Fitz recalled after a moment, was from Canada and did physics. He was also about 22 and very tall, and he was saying, “Simmons, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”

“Eighteen. Fitz is seventeen, but he turns eighteen over the break,” she replied, even though Fitz was pretty sure Peter could not care less about _his_ age.

“See?” Peter said to someone over his shoulder. He turned back to Simmons. “I _thought_ you were eighteen. Can I get you another drink?”

“Oh, no, thank you. Fitz has actually brought me one. Thank you, Fitz.”

Fitz had time to say, “you’re welcome” before Krista called Simmons’s attention away—something about a biochem development in the news. From his seat, Fitz watched her get involved in the conversation with animated gestures, his second drink making him feel pleasantly relaxed. He allowed himself to zone out a bit and ponder the state of his relationship with his partner and collaborator.

First of all, what had been that twinge of a possessive feeling when he saw her talking to Peter? Was it just that he was used to the two of them being alone, or... Did he _want_ Simmons to be his girlfriend?

Well... would it be so bad if she were? His initial panic at the idea was starting to seem a little silly. There was no denying that she _was_ a girl, especially not tonight, what with the skirt and the makeup and everything. She actually looked, he thought, rather nice—pretty. She was a pretty girl, objectively. It wasn’t that he’d never noticed this before, he’d just never really thought about it, occupied as he’d been with figuring out her brain. There was also no denying that she was his friend. He liked spending time with her more than with anyone he’d met in years. If they started dating, he imagined their relationship would be a lot like it was now, just with more kissing. He found himself wondering what it would be like to kiss Jemma Simmons.

As he mulled over this thought, Simmons caught his eye across the table, smiled, and quirked an eyebrow. Fitz felt his face go hot, even though he knew there was no way she could tell that he was thinking about kissing her.

It came as almost a relief when someone came over just then with a round of shots and declared, “We need to see if the British babies can beat Seamus at tequila shots.”

Simmons looked startled. “Oh, no, I don’t think I can—”

“Relax,” said Krista. “All you have to do to beat Seamus is do one shot of tequila without accidentally snorting it up your nose.”

While a sullen Seamus tried in vain to defend himself, Fitz leaned across the table to Simmons and said, “Look, you don’t have to try it if you don’t want to.” He noticed that her second drink was almost gone.

“No, I can do it,” she said. “I’m eighteen, right?”

“All right, then do it as fast as you can.”

A minute later, they had both handily beaten Seamus at tequila shots and were on the receiving end of another pair of high-fives from the returned High-Five Guy.

“It tastes like drinking a permanent marker,” Simmons declared, her face scrunched up, while the people around them applauded and clapped them on the back as though they’d gone through some sort of rite of passage. Perhaps they had.

The combination of alcohol and peer approval bolstered Fitz’s confidence enough that he could actually enjoy being surrounded by people who wanted to talk to him, and he soon found himself engrossed in conversation with Ahmad about how they’d done on the quantum mechanics final. He could hear Simmons also chatting away off to the side but, still self-conscious about his earlier train of thought, he didn’t turn his attention back to her until, a few minutes later, he distinctly heard her giggling. He’d never heard Simmons actually _giggle_ before. He looked over and saw her leaning a little too close to Tall Canadian Peter, her chin in one hand, staring at him with a rapt and dopey expression.

“That is just... wow!” she said, and put her hand on Peter’s arm.

Fitz felt his ears redden on her behalf. As the person who had persuaded her to drink tonight, he decided that it was incumbent upon him to save Jemma Simmons from herself. “What’s wow?” he asked.

“Peter,” Simmons moved her hand from his arm to his tall, Canadian shoulder, so she was practically hanging off of him, “has been parasailing in New Zealand. I mean _off_ New Zealand, of course. Isn’t that incredible?”

“I was there to give a paper,” Peter explained casually, for all the world as though he _didn’t_ have Jemma Simmons’s hands all over him. Or, really, as though he _enjoyed_ having her hands all over him, rather than being properly embarrassed by the whole thing as any decent human should be.

“You all right, Simmons?” Fitz asked.

“Definitely, I’m fine,” she said, and leaned in close to Peter again. “He’s asking because I’d never had a drink before tonight, and now I’ve had three.” She held up three fingers to demonstrate. “But, honestly, it’s not as bad as I thought it’d be. I just feel... relaxed. And now,” she announced, “I’m going to the loo.” She hopped down from her seat and stumbled a little, catching herself on Ahmad, then giggled again. “All right. Maybe it’s affecting me a little more than I thought. But that’s fine, it’s all fine. Enjoy your drinks. Back in a moment.”

Ahmad tried to start up their conversation again, but Fitz’s heart wasn’t in it. Simmons was attracted to Tall Canadian Peter and possibly to Ahmad, guys who were popular, conventionally attractive, had great hair. Just when he’d begun to entertain romantic notions, it became clear that she’d never looked at him the way she looked at those other guys, and she hardly ever touched him at all.

Which was fine. So Jemma Simmons wasn’t attracted to him, that was fine. A minute ago, he’d been panicking at the possibility, so he wasn’t sure why he felt dejected now, or what the deal was with this squeezy feeling in his chest. Probably it was just that, really, it wasn’t fair. Simmons could apparently get any boyfriend she wanted, whereas he, the youngest boy in the whole SciTech division of SHIELD, was now likely to stay single for at least the next few years. Simmons was his one shot. And once she started dating Tall Canadian Peter or whoever, she wouldn’t want to hang out and invent things with him. The writing was on the wall. Any time now, he would be back to working alone—to _being_ alone.

It was entirely selfish, and he felt like a jerk for thinking it. Of course Simmons deserved to be happy. He was a terrible person.

Fitz was so busy wallowing through the morass of his own confused feelings that he didn’t notice that Simmons had returned from the toilets until she slid into the seat next to him, nudging his shoulder in the process.

He turned to find her grinning at him and, after the dark turn his thoughts had taken, it came as such a relief that he found himself grinning back.

“What?” he asked.

She shrugged, then said, “Your hair’s so curly.”

There was no disputing this fact, so he nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“It’s really, really curly. I’m fascinated. May I touch it?”

“Um... sure?”

And that was how he found himself with Simmons petting and playing with his hair in the Boiler Room. He used to keep his hair short, but he’d left it to its own devices while at the Academy, so it was quite puffy now, and Simmons seemed to be enjoying that fact. It felt kind of  nice, actually. He heard himself sigh with pleasure, and went still.

So... wait... _was_ she attracted to him? She was sitting very close and smiling a lot and running her hands through his hair. He could feel her breath tickling his neck, and he recoiled from it as though from an electric shock. Then he turned and saw Simmons’s brow furrowed.

“Did I pull it too hard?”

“Just a bit.”

“Oh! Sorry!” She looked genuinely apologetic, hands covering her neck. She did that, he’d noticed when she was worried or nervous.

He gave her a tight smile. “It’s fine. No worries.”

Why had he done that? A moment ago he’d wanted nothing more than for Simmons to pay this kind of attention to him, so why had he pulled away? The thought of her actually _wanting_ to be with him opened the same sort of gaping panic inside him as the thought of her wanting to be with Peter had, and when the reason came to him he found, to his surprise, that it was the same: she was his friend, she was his only friend, and she could do better than him.

So, fine, if she became his girlfriend, then what? She’d realize she should be with someone like Peter or Ahmad or anyone else, and they’d break up. Then she wouldn’t want to hang out anymore; it’d be weird. There would be hurt feelings, probably, and misunderstandings. To avoid them, she’d stop waking him up at all hours and enforce her study schedule on someone else. He’d lose her, more completely than if she were just dating some guy.

She could go out with whomever she wanted and still collaborate with him in the lab—no one else here could keep up with her, he was fairly confident of that. She could still help him study—despite his talent, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t wash out without her timetables and study guides. Fitz had worked and lived alone since he was a kid, but with Simmons, there was so much potential for his work and his life to be _more._ He could go back to being alone sometimes, he thought, but not _always_. He could share Jemma Simmons, but he couldn’t lose her.

He was conscious that he’d been quiet for a minute or so when Simmons nudged him again, though her eyes took in the entire table as she said, “Do you know what? You know quarks?”

“Yes...” Fitz replied, unsure of where this topic had come from.

“Did you _know_. That quarks can never exist in isolation. Isn’t that weird? They just _can’t_. I love quarks. They’re the best! They’re my favorite fundamental constituent of matter.”

Something about the way she was able to rattle off “fundamental constituent of matter” even though the tequila definitely had her tipsy made him laugh.

She grinned at him. “ _What?_ ”

“Nothing.”

“Can’t I be enthusiastic about subatomic particles?”

It was Peter who answered, “Sure you can,” literally looming over Fitz from behind in all his tall, gawky, Canadian glory. He handed Simmons a beer. “I just got back from the bar, thought you’d like another drink. Quarks are my favorite, too. I mean, they come in _flavors_. Who decided that?”

“Murray Gell-Mann,” Simmons responded instantly. Fitz snickered, draining the last of his second drink. The _physicist_ didn’t know that? Simmons would wipe the floor with him.

Peter looked momentarily embarrassed. “No, right. Of course. But, uh, I mean... _why_?”

“Right?” she enthused. “‘All right, chaps, we’re going to call these varieties “up,” “down,” and “strange,” and those adjectives are now flavors.’” She shook her head, took a swig of her beer, and grimaced.

“You forgot ‘charm,’” Peter pointed out.

Fitz smirked. “But that came later.”

With remarkable timing, High-Five guy returned to high-five him.

Simmons nodded. “Exactly.” She leaned over to Fitz. “In speaking of flavors,” she muttered wryly, “this is disgusting.”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

She kept drinking it, though, in tiny sips as she talked to Fitz, Krista, Ahmad, and primarily to Peter, who kept yammering on about how he’d gone to Stark Expo last summer. Fitz would have been far more interested in this than she was, and might even have enjoyed listening, but he was honestly getting a little concerned, as Simmons forced herself to drink her beer, that it was pushing her past “pleasantly tipsy” into “everything is spinning” drunk, which was not a place she’d probably want to visit her first time out.

When he caught her eye, she rolled hers just a bit, and he took that as an opening. He leaned in and asked, “Simmons, are you going to want to turn in soon? What time’s your flight tomorrow?” she smiled and raised her eyebrows in the most obvious show of conspiracy he’d ever seen.

“Early,” she said, giving a vigorous nod.

“Ah. Shall I finish this for you so you can get back?” He picked up her beer from the table.

She shrugged in an exaggerated manner. “Oh, I suppose so.”

He finished the beer within a couple of minutes, they high-fived High-Five Guy one last time, and soon he was walking her back the short distance to her dorm. The night was clear and a chill wind was blowing, but it wasn’t so cold that they felt like they had to hurry. Simmons walked with a bounce in her step, pausing every now and then to laugh at herself.

“My flight isn’t really until the afternoon,” she told him. “But I was ready to get out of there.”

“Oh. Mine really is in the morning.”

“Oh, Fitz.” She brushed her hand against his arm before skipping a few steps ahead. “I can’t believe I did all that,” she marveled. “I can’t believe I stayed in the Boiler Room for hours. I can’t believe I drank so much. I can’t believe I had _fun_.”

“Come on, Simmons, you’re a scientist. A scientist who loves quarks, no less. You’ve got to believe the observed facts, even if they’re surprising.” Privately, though, Fitz agreed. He was surprised at her and at himself, too, but for now he was feeling cheerful about it.

Simmons’s voice broke into his thoughts. “We’re like quarks, I think.”

“What, people?”

“You and I.”

He blinked. “We are?”

“Yes. Don’t you think so?”

“Uh...” He chuckled and decided to humor her. “Okay. Sure. I’ll be Strange and you be Charm.”

“I think we’re both Strange, honestly.” They reached the door of her building. “Or anyway, whatever we are, we’re the same.”

She smiled up at him, and he found himself wanting to kiss her. An alarm bell sounded in his head, reminding him that he’d _just_ thought through this, not two hours ago he’d decided he couldn’t risk it. He’d had reasons— _good_ reasons. But just then he was having trouble caring about them, because she was looking up at him with sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks and telling him they were the same flavor of quark, and he was looking down at her, and she was the only friend he had and he wanted to kiss her. He leaned forward, ever so slightly, and he could swear that she leaned in, too.

She was his only friend. Reality kicked back in like a gust of icy wind to the face, and he pulled back in a moment of panic. She was his only friend and she’d been drinking, and what was he _thinking_? He shook himself a little, pretending it was from the cold, and raised one hand.

“High five?” he offered.

“High five,” Simmons affirmed, slapping her palm against his with no indication that she’d even noticed the moment which had passed between them, unless her cheeks were a little pinker than they’d been before. She slipped inside her building, and Fitz walked back to his dorm with his hands shoved into his pockets, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth.

It wasn’t until he got inside his room and saw the empty suitcase where he’d left it on the floor that it really sunk in that he had to be at the airport in five hours and he still hadn’t packed.

That was the first time he finished one of her drinks.

 


End file.
